Linked Again!

Thanks for the href, Mike. Looks like I haven't posted anything in a month. That's not too good. It's a good thing I don't have anything important to say!

So I was thinking about words again. There's a fairly recent prefix that's entered the popular lexicon in the last decade or so: meta-. In the computer industry it's been around for longer than that. Databases have metadata, Unix-style keyboards have the meta key, and HTML documents have <meta> tags, which you use to give special directives to the browser.

In general, application of meta- to a word means to take the word and apply it to itself. Metadata literally is "data about data". It's frightfully important stuff. In a database table, the data itself may look like this: "Jones", "Jack", 27, 1324, 6. Meaningless unless you know the metadata, which tells you what those data mean: "LastName", "FirstName", "Age", "SAT Score", "Number of magazine subscriptions currently held."

In the psychological realm, metamemory is memory about memory. Metaphysics is the study of how physics works. In theory, you could (and I'm sure many have) study Metametaphysics, or the study of how metaphysics works. I have a book in my office by Strunk and White called The Elements of Style, and it's a work of metawriting.

I find it interesting that you can take items like this and declare that they are not the last word on the subject. You can go a level higher up and take the view of the field from 30000 feet and think, "Now where can we go from here?"

It's not every word that lends itself to metazation, either. Only certain concepts merit the kind of recursive cognition that allow you to land on metaconcepts. On Friday, I had to participate in a metameeting, where we planned what we're going to do in a future meeting we're going to have with a customer. Right now, I'm blogging into a meta-website. It's all around us.

OK, now I can shut up for another month. Just kidding.